Balancing
on Air is Kate Fenton on sparkling form A funny and
highly engaging novel
Woman's JournalThoroughly entertaining
IndependentDoes for local radio what Drop the Dead
Donkey does for television news
Phil Rickman, BBC WalesA terrific read. I loved it.
Lynda Lee Potter

'Like juggling ferrets while singing
a calypso and riding a unicycle ' That's how Rose Shawe
describes her job. If you've ever presented a live radio show,
you'll know what she means.

Mind you, Rose loves her daily three hours.
When things are running smoothly, she truly believes it's
a pleasure and a privilege to be steering the good ship Radio
Ridings across the airwaves. When, however, she's been battered
by one of the BBC's wackier management courses, when her delinquent
old Dad wrecks a phone-in - and when, to top it all, she learns
the station's getting a new Deputy Editor, name of Tom Wilkes

The guy's coming from telly (dodgy), London
(worse) and is a journalist to boot. Non-news types like Rose
love to hate the hack-pack. But that's the least of her worries
because, for all she's is a highly respectable pillar of Yorkshire
life these days, Rose has a past - one hell of a past. And
she's afraid this Tom Wilkes will blow her intricate web of
secrets sky high. Still, you know the old broadcasting adage:
when calamity strikes on air, smile. A smile will inflect
the microphone voice with a miraculous glow of confidence.
Or so they say. Poor Rose is in danger of rupturing her cheek
muscles.

It doesn't help that bloody civil war is
sprouting in the station as her old friend George (motto Reith
or Glory), mounts a gallantly hopeless last stand in defence
of Steam Wireless against the likes of Stephen Sharpe. He's
the statistic-crunching, Armani-plated Dalek who's been brought
in to run the joint - or ruin it, depending on your point
of view. He is also, as it happens, Rose's lover.

She is going to have to learn - painfully
- the truth of that other hoary old radio adage. To be a good
broadcaster you must, first and foremost, be yourself.

footnote: VARIATIONS ON AIR AND A G-STRING

I like to think that nothing's actually wasted. Though it's hard
to believe this when I chuck another telephone directory-sized typescript
into the Dead Novel Chest, which was what had happened to my first
attempt at a book set in the world of radio, (see notes to Lions
& Liquorice).

It should have been terrific. After all, you're supposed to write
about what you know, and BBC radio is the only proper day job I've
ever had. I may not actually have laboured at the sharp end of local
broadcasting, where a whole day's programming is somehow spun from
a budget that would barely buy the tea and buns on Radio 4, but
I'd long ago realized that a local radio station in a provincial
town is a brilliant setting for a novel. These stations - the good
ones, anyhow - really are at the heart of a community. All life
passes through their studios, politicians great and small, straight
and crooked; the community movers, shakers and agitators; the neighbourhood
nutters as well as visiting soap stars and celebrity footballers.
Best of all, a presenter on such a station needs no excuse to poke
his or her nose into anything that's going on locally. Asking questions
is the essence of the job.

So why hadn't my first attempt worked? There was a vast array of
rich material I wanted to pack in. Every local radio employee I'd
talked to had endless tales of disasters on and off air which were
hilarious, even if most were far too improbable to be included in
a novel. It's a well-known cliché that truth is stranger
than fiction. Perhaps it's more accurate to say that fiction has
to be more plausible than real life - which, as we all know, frequently
boggles belief. The radio documentaries I used to make - real lives,
real people - told stories which were far more incredible than anything
I'd dare invent in a book.

I got a bit carried away with the supporting cast of bit-part players,
too. The DJ, for example, whose dark brown velvet voice is six feet
tall and sexy as Sean Connery in a wet tuxedo, attracting bucket-loads
of fan mail a week. Shame then, that the guy concealed behind the
microphone is a four-foot ferret with pebble specs who lives with
his mum and wears polyester golfing sweaters. Thus the well-known
expression 'a great face for radio ' Every station has one.

Unfortunately, the plot underpinning this rich cavalcade wasn't
up to much. It involved large quantities of smuggled cannabis, rare
koi carp, a psychopathic teenage toff, an affair between a middle-aged
mum and a juvenile delinquent and I think I'd best draw a
merciful veil over the rest. The randy ferret-faced DJ was a bit
of a treat, though. Shame he didn't make it to the final cut.

Because when I start again on an idea like this, I really do start
again, with a blank page. It's not a matter of returning to the
shaggy old manuscript, weeding out the duff bits, and stringing
the better sections together along a new, improved plotline. I can
rarely re-cycle even small chunks of the original text. Unfortunately.
Time and again, I've tried to graft into a new book an existing
stretch of dialogue that I flattered myself was rather witty, or
a particularly purple little descriptive passage. Call it transplant
surgery - and the transplant virtually never takes. I don't want
to sound pretentious, still less creepily mystical, but it's my
experience that novels have to grow. They have to develop an organic
life of their own, have to sprout characters and situations you,
the author, have never dreamed of.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know it sounds loopy. I only mention it because
lots of authors say similar things. When I was a producer on Radio
4's Bookshelf I heard more than one novelist claim that their fictional
creations would argue with them, declaring - for all the world like
some prima donna actor in a soap opera - that their character simply
wouldn't do this or that. Tolkein, apparently, claimed the character
of Strider just appeared, unplanned, in The Lord of the Rings. The
author had no idea who this dark, mysterious stranger sitting in
the inn with the hobbits might be, but recognized at once he was
destined to play a significant role in the saga. I'd have found
this hard to credit, if I hadn't had similar experiences. Very strange
and rather unsettling really, because you can't plan for the unplanned.
You can only hope.

So anyway, when I decided to have another go at setting a book
in radio - after romping merrily through Lions & Liquorice
in the meantime - I was starting from scratch, as far as actual
words on the page were concerned. However, even if the old text
was junked, that didn't mean I couldn't carry some of the ideas
forward, as well as the more successful characters. It's a bit like
gardening, really. You nurture these puny and unconvincing little
seedlings in the first book, and by the time you transplant them
to the richer soil of your new improved plot, they're ready to romp
away.

Having said that, I wasn't wildly enamoured of my existing heroine,
Rose/Rita, but in the absence of better ideas, was prepared to give
her a second chance, along with her bolshie teenage daughter, Polly.
One of the few aspects that had seemed to work before was the combative
relationship between the two of them. The radio station itself,
well, that was all there, too. But it was like a dusty toy theatre
and a box of collapsed puppets. Nothing was animating them. I drew
up sheaves of potential plotlines and ideas, tried to write - and
got nowhere. Unusually, however, I know exactly where and when the
breakthrough point came on this book.

It was at the dinner table, several glasses down a bottle of burgundy.
OK, I can't guarantee the wine was actually Burgundy, but allow
me a spot of poetic licence. Mr Carmichael and I were certainly
several sheets to the wind because, in spite of copious experience
to the contrary, I'm still inclined to believe, in extremis, that
inspiration might lurk at the bottom of a bottle. Or three. Ian
was doing his best to play supportive spouse, which generally makes
me want to throttle him. Not his fault, of course it isn't, but
when you're in the depths of writerly despair, it is neither helpful
nor comforting to be breezily assured that you've been through all
this before and will come through again just fine.

I don't as a rule inflict my plot problems on my husband, incidentally.
Short temper, long silences, yes, but I don't treat him to a reading
of today's output over the gin & tons, and nor do I generally
explain what's troubling me at the word-face. This isn't out of
selflessness or consideration for his nerves, I'm just not the problem-sharing
type. I realized long ago, in my BBC days, that creative coves divide
into two camps. There are those who like to try out every idea,
whim and dilemma on their nearest, dearest or whoever's passing
the office door - to parade their fledgling creations in front of
an audience, as it were, ear attuned for cheers or boos - and those,
like me, who huddle alone in a dark corner and fret. Darkly.

So when Ian, with exemplary patience, asked if I could explain
exactly what the trouble was with this book, I gave my usual response.
Which was largely unrepeatable and in the negative. Well then, he
persisted sweetly, couldn't I at least tell him what this story
was supposed to be about? I probably scowled and heaved the kind
of long-suffering sigh stroppy teenagers deploy when asked to tidy
their bedroom. But I did tell him.

It was all about this radio station, I growled - or something to
that effect - with a presenter, or maybe producer, called Rose Shawe.
Well, called Rose now, but she used to be called Rita because, oh,
she was once a sort of cabaret singer. Which was, incidentally,
proving to be a complete and total nightmare, because the plot was
getting hopelessly bogged down with my trying unobtrusively to slot
in enough detail of her complicated past to explain her present
behaviour. However

"Singer?" chipped-in the lad, doubtless because cabaret
is more up his street than the politics of local radio.

Thus, I had to explain what sort of singer she was, what sort of
cabaret - Blackpool, I said instantly, (drawing at random on my
own, ahem, early showbiz career, detailed on the biog page), but
it had to be Blackpool, I knew that. And in that instant, I had
a startlingly clear vision of Rose at twenty-four - or rather Rita,
as she'd then been. All hennaed hair, clenched cleavage, tottery
stilettos. I don't know if I actually fell silent, mouth agape,
but it felt like that. Because the key to the book was coming to
me. Rose's past - her previous incarnation as Rita - was not boring
backplot detail to be stitched as invisibly as possible into the
present day story, it was the core, the mainspring, the raison d'etre
of the whole book. Her past was what motivated her, drove her on,
made her tick. Her immaculately renovated house, her skills as a
radio presenter; her obsession with middle-class respectability
- her very daughter - all of these sprang from that sleazy cabaret
artiste in the spangled G-string, Rita Shawe - no, not Shawe, Bagshawe.
The very lovely, the ritzy - hell, I could hear a sweaty club compere
announcing her act, crummy mike a-pop - the rip-roaring, RITA BAGSHAWE!!!

I was away. Never looked back. And while I can't claim the book
flowed out in one seamless whole, it had nevertheless found its
life and soul. The essence of Rose is that she's hiding the Rita
within. And this touched a chord with me, because don't most of
us reinvent ourselves along the way, to some extent, anyway? Give
a little polish to our life histories - a tweak here, a smudge of
discreet amnesia there? I freely admit there are times and places
when I'm more likely to recall playing chamber music in an Oxford
Quad than belting out Hey Big Spender on Blackpool's Golden Mile.

Everything else fell into place from that point on. What had been
the psychopathic teenage toff in the old book - a character so deeply
implausible I could scarcely induce him to utter a word - transmogrified
into the adorably gawky, eighteen-year-old Thomas Wilkes. The ferrety-faced
disc jockey, sadly, stayed on the cutting room floor. But in his
place came My Friend George, who remains one of my favourite characters.
She's a creative artist of the airwaves in the grand old BBC tradition
and, at the time I wrote the book, her real-life contemporaries
were being slashed out of network radio by the scythe of that grimmest
of reapers, John Birt. You don't find many like her in local radio
- don't find them in BH London these days, come to that - but I'm
glad to have encountered her like. I was less enchanted by the grey-suited,
number-crunching, jargon-gargling clones of Stephen Sharpe. Much
as I'd like to claim he was a monstrous figment of my imagination,
I reckon he's an almost kindly caricature of the genuine article.

There was one character I was to regret having invented, however:
Rose's wicked old Dad, Mac Bagshawe. This was because I was invited
to record the book, in its entirety - correction, in its entirety
minus rude words - for a talking book company. Chuffed to bits,
I couldn't wait to get behind the microphone until I remembered
Mac. He's a Scot - a Glaswegian Scot at that - and I can only do
two accents. Me posh, and me northern. With, OK, a few shades in
between. This covered most contingencies in the novel, but not Mac's
tar-soaked, Gorbals growl. I did my best. Closeted myself with a
tape-recorder and a kindly Hibernian neighbour by way of voice coach,
watched Billy Connolly, gargled with whisky, the works. But I fear
the result is about as authentic as a Tandoori haggis.